Tag: hugo awards 2017 (Page 4 of 4)

Hugo reading 2017: This Census Taker, by China Mieville

May 22, 2017 / Catherine / 0 Comments

This Census Taker, by China Mieville just didn’t work for me. I’m not sure whether that’s my fault or Miéville’s, but I found it very frustrating to read. It has quite a strong style (and I admit, I prefer my prose transparent), and is quite poetic, and the narrator has the infuriating habit of changing from ‘I’ to ‘the boy’ or even ‘you’. I am sure that this is intentional, but it dragged me out of the story every time.

Which was not, on the whole, a terrible thing, because I wasn’t enjoying the story very much.

It’s hard to say what the story is about. There is a boy, who was raised in a fairly isolated place above the down by his parents. There is his father who is gentle and kind except when he beats animals to death. He also quite probably murders the boy’s mother, though this is ambiguous, and he almost certainly murders others, but this is also not clear. These deaths are disappearances, or we have the not-necessarily-reliable narration of the boy, or we only see them obliquely. There are other children who believe the boy about this; there are villagers who believe him enough not to trade with the father, but not enough not to leave the boy in the father’s care. There are magical keys, but it is hard to say what they unlock. The children who believe the boy disappear, too, and one has to wonder if the father killed them.

The tone is weirdly serene for a book with this much implied and sometimes outright violence. And really, if there are murders in a book, I would much prefer to be sure that they happened. Is this so much to ask? The pacing is also bizarre. The book itself appeared to have 275 pages. At around 190 pages, I thought I possibly understood enough of the premise to describe it in my notes. Then – hooray! Suddenly there is action and movement and things falling into place and – oops, sorry, the book is actually only 200 pages long, the rest is previews of other work, we’re all done here.

Aaargh.

I honestly don’t know what to make of this story. It’s disturbing and strange and full of cruelty to animals, and I think only barely falls into the realm of SFF. I think I like it more than the De Valle, but once again, I feel like I’m missing something. A key, perhaps, which is somewhat ironic…

Hugo Reading 2017: The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor Lavalle

May 21, 2017 / Catherine / 0 Comments

The second novella I read was The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor Lavalle. This story is dedicated ‘For H.P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings’. I haven’t read any Lovecraft, so the only things I know about him are 1. Horror; 2. Cthulu; 3. Racism. All of which, needless to say, I know only at second hand.

It turns out that this was not sufficient preparation for this story. For someone who is not expecting Lovecraft, or familiar with his tropes, the story seems to be a very noirish sort of tale, set in 1920s New York, centering around Charles Thomas Tester, who is black, a terrible musician, a reasonably astute con-man, and an occasional purveyor of magical artefacts. He is rather collected by an older, white occultist, called Robert Suydam, who is trying to summon some sort of sleeping king by using magic learned from the various immigrant populations of New York. Then his father is murdered by police in ‘self defense’, when they mistake his guitar for a gun, and he goes all in to the occult / revenge plot.

Honestly, this wasn’t my thing, and I felt as though it didn’t quite make sense. Which I mentioned to my husband, who quickly recognised the names Suydam and Malone and realised that the whole thing was kind of a pastiche / response to Lovecraft’s famously racist tale The Horror at Red Hook. And so I went away and read a couple of synopses and essays about Red Hook, and bingo! The story suddenly works a lot better. But I’m not sure that the mark of a good story is that it requires further reading to make sense? I am reluctant to say this, because I like playing with pastiche, too. And the story sort of worked without knowing any of that, but I feel as though knowing the original story would have brought this to life a lot more – just reading synopses made me realise that there were particular scenes being referred back to in clever ways.

I do think the racism – the constant, draining, everyday weight of it – was brought out very well in this story. And I like the fact that even the decent detective, the one who is not being gratuitously awful on every occasion, still participates in making the murder of Tommy’s father ‘legal’. And that the greatest fear at the end of the book, the one that is so great that it can’t even be permitted to be a memory, is that a Black man could have defeated so many white cops, armed only with a razor. I also note that the really nasty, racist private detective, the one who murders Tommy’s father, goes by the name of Mr Howard…

In conclusion, I’d say that The Ballad of Black Tom is well written, and not a bad story, if decidedly not my cup of tea, and probably very clever. I’ve seen reviews calling it a brilliant retort to Lovecraft, and it probably is. But since I don’t really know what it is retorting to, I can’t see it landing high on my ballot.

OK, I think that will do me for now. I desperately need to read something which I don’t have to think critically about! I shall return to these reviews in a few days.

Oh, and speaking of reviews, I have another one up at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. I finally managed to draw a RITA nominee that I actually liked! And in the Romantic Suspense category, of all places…

Hugo reading 2017: Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire

May 20, 2017 / Catherine / 0 Comments

After all those short stories and comics, I wanted something a bit longer. But I’m not quite ready to commit to the novels yet, so it’s novella time!

First cab off the rank was Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire. I’ve actually read this already, but it was a pleasure to re-read it. The basic premise of this story is that sometimes, the children who go to Narnia, or Oz, or Fairyland, or Wonderland, or the Land of the Dead, don’t want to come home. But they do anyway, and then what can they do? Well, fortunately for them, Eleanor West, who spent most of her childhood visiting a Nonsense world, has set up a school for these children, which is good, because whether they are High Nonsense / Virtuous, or High Logic / Wicked they tend to be a little bit odd.

Nancy has recently returned from the Land of the Dead, where she spent several years learning stillness before she was sent home to our world, in order to be sure that she wanted to stay. She is certain that the door will open again for her. Sadly, her parents think that she was kidnapped for six months and just want their bright, vibrant daughter back. They also want her to be normal and go on dates, which is a problem for Nancy, because she is asexual.

At the Home for Wayward Children, Nancy meets other children who are like her, but not like her. There is the hyperactive Sami, who spent time in a High Nonsense, candy-themed world; Allison, who ran on rainbows; the beautiful Kane, whose fairyland kicked him out when they realised that the little girl they had kidnapped was ‘actually a little boy who just happened to look like a little girl’ (I do like this way of describing a transgender character); the twins, Jack and Jill, who came from a rather dark world ruled by vampires, where Jack was apprenticed to the local mad scientist, and Jill was the chosen adopted daughter of the local vampire lord; and Christopher, my personal favourite, who went to a world of ‘happy, dancing skeletons’, and can still make skeletons dance with his bone flute.

Alas, someone is murdering the children at the school, and Nancy’s status as the new girl with an affinity for Death (and a tendency to be drawn to the other children from the darker worlds) makes her a suspect.

This story is great fun. It’s quite dark and scary in places, but there is a lovely sense of humour to it, and I do like the way Seanan writes characters whose sexualities are not the standard cis/het variety. I liked all of the characters, and of course the premise is awesome. The mystery was a bit light on – it was clear to me fairly early on who the murderer was – but in fact that didn’t matter, because the suspense came from a) the characters working it out b) wondering just what they would do when they did, since the personal moralities of these characters was pretty variable, and c) wondering whether any of the children would find their way ‘home’ to their other worlds. Which was, I think, something that mattered to the children even more than the murders did.

The bizarre bit is that I could have sworn that the answer to c) was different the first time I read this novella.

But I’ve just checked my hard copy of this book, and unless Seanan McGuire has channelled some sort of alternate universe magic – which is certainly possible – it was the same. Very odd. Anyway, I like this a lot, and it’s going to be high on my ballot!

Hugo reading 2017: Introduction and Graphic Stories

May 19, 2017 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Day 1:

The Hugo voter pack arrived in my inbox today, and because I take my democratic duty very seriously, I’m planning to read as much of it as I can. I’m comforting myself with the thought that it can’t possibly be as puppy-infested as last year, but I’m also wondering if I am truly morally obliged to read what is almost certain to be a rapetastic and nasty-minded Chuck Tingle parody by an author who chooses to go by the name ‘Stix Hiscock’.

I’ve already looked through and voted on the professional and fan-art, some of which was really lovely. I especially liked Elizabeth Leggett and Likhain in the fanart category, and was quite taken with Galen Dara, Chris McGrath and Victo Ngai in the professional artist category. Though, now I think about it, I think I actually preferred Leggett and Likhain to any of those three.

The latter was an interesting category to judge – I found that I tend to judge cover art on a) whether it’s pretty to look at (I’m really not a very visual person, and know nothing about art, so that’s the best I can do), and b) whether it suggests a book I would like to read. So the first three on my ballot all fell into the ‘very pretty’ category, and the last three, which did not appeal strongly to me, I really judged by how likely I would be to read those books. Which meant that John Picacio came last, not because he is a poor artist – none of them were, as far as I am able to judge – but because his covers said ‘1950s pulp SF with hardly any female characters’ to me. Julie Dillon, who is, I suspect, objectively not necessarily a better artist had books that screamed ‘fun, but not very well-thought-out fantasy or light SF with plenty of female characters, and I’d probably feel embarrassed to read this book, but I’d still love it’, and Sana Takeda – who I felt didn’t quite belong in this category, as she was the only one doing graphic novels rather than covers – came fifth on the grounds that her work said ‘graphic novels, probably quite good ones, but I don’t really like graphic novels’.

Which brings me to the graphic novels. Let me start by saying that I really do not enjoy reading graphic novels – I tend to find it hard to pay attention to the graphics, and I feel like I’m not getting enough plot-per-page to carry them around as reading material. (Yes, I’m a philistine, but I like my stories neat. So I’m not a great judge for this category, but that’s not going to stop me voting in it!

I started with Black Panther Volume 1: A Nation Under Our Feet, by Ta-Nehisi Coates and illustrated by Brian Stelfreeze. I am the wrong audience for all graphic novels, because of the aforementioned non-visual-appreciatingness, but also because I have terrible trouble telling the characters apart. I just can’t hold their faces in my head very well, and so I find the plot hard to follow. This was even more the case here, because the plot appeared to be complicated and political, and something that I would probably have rather enjoyed if it had been the start of a novel, but as it was, I couldn’t figure out which faction was which and who was allied to whom and why. Also, I found the narrative style a little irritating – very rhetorical and portentuous, which only works for me if I am quite invested in a story.

Rather a pity, because I’ve read and enjoyed a number of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essays, and I was hoping to enjoy this more.

My second graphic novel was Ms Marvel Volume 5: Super Famous, by Willow Wilson and illustrated by Takeshi Miyazawa. I came to this one with high hopes, having heard a bit about Kamala around the place, and I was not disappointed. It’s heaps of fun, super cute, and the ending is adorable. Nice plot about an evil development company using drones and evil magic potions to take over the town, but it’s really all about the characters (who I can actually tell apart! Hooray!). Kamala has a whole network of family and friends who are clearly people with their own stories, and her story is as much (if not more) about her relationships with them and her difficulty juggling all her responsibilities as it is about her superpowers. And there are some great one-liners. I love the whole concept of a superhero with physics homework and boy problems, and I’m always up for witty dialogue, so this one is a win for me.

I may even have to overcome my aversion to graphic novels to read more of it. Maybe.

Day 2: My lunchbreak reading today was Monstress, Volume 1: Awakening, by Marjorie Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda. I do not recommend this as lunchbreak reading, as it is quite bloody. I have a feeling that I’ve read some of Liu’s short stories, but I’m struggling to remember them. This is another very political fantasy, and it’s humans versus arcana. Arcana have wings or tails or superpowers and seem on the surface of things to be more potentially powerful than humans, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. And also, it seems that killing them, or consuming parts of them, allows humans to be healed of wounds, and even become semi-immortal. You really don’t have to get very far with this premise to end up in some fairly unpleasant places, and this book certainly does that. Beyond this, there are multiple factions within both the Arcana and the humans, which again I found hard to follow, because I had trouble distinguishing between characters. (I just do better if I have names to tag characters to rather than faces – graphic novels rely much less heavily on names because they assume you can tell everybody apart. Ha.)

I’m a bit torn on where to rank this one. The artwork was really, really lovely, my favourite of all the books so far, but this didn’t help me recognise characters, alas. Which made it very confusing – when you have lots of factions and have trouble telling which is which, that’s a problem. And it was way too dark for my taste – highlights include torture, lots of maiming and killing, people being eaten, and babies being threatened with horrible fates. This is another story which I would have enjoyed more in novel format, I think, except that it is so VERY much not my cup of tea. But at least in novel format, I would have had fewer visuals in my head.

So yes. My instinct is to rank it higher than Black Panther, because of the artwork, even though Black Panther was just confusing, as opposed to confusing and distressing. But I haven’t decided yet.

My tram reading was Paper Girls, Volume 1, by Brian Vaughan, illustrated by Cliff Chiang, coloured by Matthew Wilson and lettered by Jared Fletcher. I liked this quite a bit. It had a sort of 1980s feel to it, which was appealing, and centres around four teenage girls who are delivering newspapers when there is… an alien invasion. Or maybe a time traveller invasion. With multiple factions. Hooray, more politics! I found the characters mostly easy to tell apart (though two of the girls kept looking very alike to me), but I still spent a lot of this story feeling confused. I’m beginning to think that perhaps I am rather stupid. Then again, time-travel plots tend to require you to get to the end of the book before everything makes sense, and this is clearly just the start of the story.

This is definitely at second place on my ballot so far, after Ms Marvel, but ahead of the other two. Part of me would like to read more, because I did like the characters, and I always like a good time travel plot, but I’m not sure I’m willing to make the investment of time required. I didn’t love it, and the artwork did not excite me. And the weird near death experience stuff didn’t quite work for me. I think there is also possibly some religious subtext going on (apple computers = apples + fruit of knowledge; heaven and hell in dreams; a bearded guy who looks like a cliché cartoon of God in an apple T shirt, who is in charge of judging people), but I’m not too sure where it is going, and feel a little wary…

Day 3

Another graphic novel read in my lunch break! Can I have four categories done and dusted by tonight? Of course I can!

So, next up was Saga, Volume 6, by Brian K Vaughan, illustrated by Fiona Staples and lettered by Fonografiks. I wondered how I’d go with making sense of this one, since it’s volume 6, but I actually quite liked it. The characters were strong, and I could mostly tell them apart, and there didn’t seem to be too many factions going on (though again, factions and politics – is that a big trend at the moment, or have graphic novels always been about warfare and politics and tribalism?). This particular story centred around a couple who are of different and enemy (but apparently cross-fertile) species, who are trying to find their daughter again. She seems to be locked in some sort of prison camp / re-education kindergarten, and if anyone finds out who she is they will try to kill her. The why of this is presumably in previous volumes. There was a bunch of stuff I didn’t quite follow which clearly related to the overarching story, but the central narrative of this story was quite nice, and I enjoyed reading it. Possibly the more so because it fit in so nicely with my enjoyment of the Vaughn short story… I apparently like narratives where supposed enemies are friends and working together.

Again, I don’t feel any particularly strong need to read more of the story (and for goodness sake, if you are reading it, don’t read it at work. There were several pages I had to turn quickly without reading because those were images I just could not have on my work computer), but I did like it. It has just overtaken Paper Girls and is sitting in second place, after Ms Marvel.

Fingers crossed, I’ll be able to read The Vision, Volume 1: Little Worse than a Man, by Tom King, illustrated by Gabriel Hernandez Walta, between work and my hair appointment today, and I will post the review then…

OK. I started The Vision. I got nearly halfway, and was finding it OK (and for once, having no difficulty telling characters apart), but then there was a scene with someone doing something terrible to a cat who looked quite a bit like Mystery, and that was it for me. I’m afraid I’m not going to read any further into that one, because I don’t need more pictures like that in my head (the cartoonist draws cats really well, and that doesn’t help), and I really wasn’t enjoying it enough to risk it. I don’t know how I can possibly judge this one, so it just won’t go on my ballot.

My delving into Graphic stories for this year is officially over.

Hugo reading 2017: Short Stories

May 19, 2017 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Since I had choir last night, and PDFs of graphic novels are not too portable, I decided to take a break from them and have a crack at the Short Stories category. Which is SO MUCH BETTER than last year you CANNOT IMAGINE.

NK Jemisin – The City Born Great. This is a story about the birth of New York, not in the sense of its founding, but of its birth and coming to awareness as a sentient, living being. The protagonist is, for want of a better word, the city’s protector and its midwife, which is a bit tricky, since they (I’m not actually sure if gender was ever specified) are decidedly underprivileged – homeless, hungry, and black. I loved the bits about singing to the city, and graffitiing by circles in a black so dark that it looked like a hole so that the city could breathe through these new ventilations. NK Jemisin clearly loves New York the way I love Paris. There is a nice poetry and sense of history to this story, and I love the concept. I like this story very much.

John C Wright – An Unimaginable Light. I went into this one a little prejudiced, because I know that Wright is associated with the Catholic end of the Rabid Puppies. I tried very hard to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Alas, this happened on page 2.

The kneeling girl did not look like a robot. She looked like a love goddess. Her face was piquant and elfin, her eyes danced and glittered. Her lips were full, her smile ready. She was pulchritudinous, buxom, callipygous, leggy. Her torso was slender, and her abdominal muscles as well defined as those of a belly dancer, so that her navel was like a period between two cursive brackets. Her hair was lustrous, and tied in a loose knot at the back of her swanlike neck. Hairy eye, and skin colour were optional. She was, of course, naked.

Oh, of course she was. And Mr Wright needs to put down his thesaurus now. And also wash the hand that wasn’t holding the thesaurus because I think we all know where it has been. Ick.

This story seems to be a philosophical argument about who is truly human disguised as a short story about a man interrogating a robot, with rather pretentious styling. It is also a fable about how moral relativism is stupid. And how PC culture is oppressive and whiny and microaggressions are just about people bullying people who have *real* morals. It is not as clever as it thinks it is. However, it is heavy-handed, pompous and sexist, and it also gets sadistic and rapey in the middle, which is just lovely. Also, Wright never misses an opportunity to remind us of the robot’s shapely form or flirtatious gaze. Bleargh.

Then we have a plot twist! And theology! And our constantly objectified heroine – who turns out to be called Maria, because that’s just how subtle John C Wright is – isn’t a robot at all! The interrogator was the robot all along, but he didn’t know this! Oh, my shock, it is so shocking! Of course, the way he discovers this is that Maria gets executed in a particularly gruesome and painful way because apparently this is the best way to convey that Love is the most important value and that without religion people will obviously make terrible, sadistic choices.

(Also because Wright’s Catholicism is big on suffering, but it’s better if women suffer, especially if we get to describe their shapely limbs in detail while they do so.)

Also, this plot twist kind of makes a lot of the rest of the plot illogical. Because the whole bit about the interrogator being turned on by hurting Maria is revolting enough when he is human, but makes absolutely no sense if he is a robot, especially as he is apparently following Asimov’s three laws of robotics.

I think this one is a clear No Award for me. It’s pretty terrible.

Alyssa Wong – A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers. This one is very good. The protagonist keeps trying to change time so that she can save her sister, again and again. So many permutations of one event, but not enough. It reminds me a lot of Kate Atkinson’s novel, Life after Life, actually. It’s sad and sweet and rather beautiful. It’s going to be tough to choose between this and the Jemisin. I think the Jemisin is more original, though. And I do have a thing for sentient objects.

Carrie Vaughn – That Game We Played During the War. This story is set in the aftermath of a war between the telepathic Gaantish and the non-telepathic, but very practical, Enithi. A Enithi former nurse who looked after Gaantish prisoners of war (who had to be kept sedated to frustrate their telepathy) comes to visit a former prisoner, and former captor, and friend, who is now in hospital, recovering from wounds received in one of the last battles of the war.

Oh, I love this. Not least because I want to read the romance novel that I am convinced is hidden behind and around this story.

I love that they have developed a way to play chess – which is of course tricky with telepathy involved. Calla, the Enithi nurse, thinks about all the moves Valk could make, but does not think about her moves, and in fact often moves at random, because it’s the only way to hide her strategy from Valk, and also, the randomness drives him up the wall. I admit to finding this especially appealing because I am a horrible chess player who gets overwhelmed by possibilities and thus also moves at random, only I do that most of the time. I also love the implications for how soldiers and prisoners and captors think about each other in this war, and the ways in which fears don’t match up with reality. But most of all I love the friendship in this book, which transcends war and enmity. This is such a kind, affectionate sort of story, the perfect antidote to John bloody Wright. It reminds me of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Shards of Honoor, in all the best ways. I want to read more of Vaughan’s work. This is going to the top of my ballot.

Brooke Bolander – Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies. A sadistic killer decides to make a harpy his victim. It doesn’t end well for him. This story is pretty clearly inspired by reading one too many stories about the ‘distraught father and husband’ who murdered his family, or the ‘promising young man’ whose bright future is being put at terrible risk by the fact that he raped someone (thank goodness for judges who won’t let him suffer too badly for twenty minutes of action!). It is full of rage, as is appropriate. It’s a good story, but there are a lot of good stories this year, and I prefer friendship and wonder to rage, so it’s probably going to be low on my ballot. But can I just say how delightful and refreshing it is to be forced to put a good story low on my ballot because there are so many good stories and they can’t all be at the top?

Amal El-Mohtar – Seasons of Glass and Iron. Another one that I love! This is a subversive, feminist fairy tale, so I am all over it like a RASH. The girl with the iron shoes (and I love how she reflects that the boys get seven league boots and slippers that make them invisible, while the girls get shoes made of molten iron or slippers that make you dance yourself to death) meets the girl on the glass mountain (who really does not want any of the suitors who fall in love with her, then shout horrific abuse at her when they fail to win her). I love how each heroine can see the injustices in the other’s story so easily, but cannot see the injustices in her own. And the ending is obvious and inevitable and utterly appropriate. This is totally the story I wish I’d written.

At this stage, I’m having trouble deciding on whether to put Vaughan ahead of El-Mohtar (mostly because I love Vaughan too much, and feel like I love it for the wrong reasons) (but I still love it more because that’s who I am), but Jemisin is definitely third, Wong is fourth, and Bolander is in fifth place. Woe is me, I shall have to read the Vaughan and the El-Mohtar stories again, just to be sure of who should go first…

Tag: hugo awards 2017 (Page 4 of 4)

Hugo reading 2017: This Census Taker, by China Mieville

Hugo Reading 2017: The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor Lavalle

Hugo reading 2017: Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire

Hugo reading 2017: Introduction and Graphic Stories

Hugo reading 2017: Short Stories

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